How to Make a Seamless Metal Dish

Making Seamless Metal Dish of Various Shapes

Keep up to date with the latest metalsmithing news and release of new jewelry making tutorials

Sometimes it is necessary to have solder-less dishes also called lockets because the design requires it, or the metal cannot be bench soldered as is the case with titanium. I experimented with different shapes and different metals to test the results.

Below, I show step by step, how I made these seamless metal dishes.

Basically you need two rods of steel the same diameter and in this picture I used some scrap brass plate.

Gemstone Setting Technique - round bezel punch set frazer

Then the brass is aligned up like in the picture.

All aligned, the steel rods and the brass plate is clamped into the vice.

Then the outer lip is tapped over using a punch, like this.

Tapped all the way over.

Then I took a piece of 1 mm titanium and did the same thing

There you have seamless lockets made in brass and titanium.

So then I decided to see if a square dish would work.

Logic told me the corners would tear.

Weird thing is the corners
didn’t tear, but formed little horns.

So after the brass was trimmed, I did the same to experiment with a square titanium shape.

Naturally the titanium was a bit harder and I annealed it a couple of more times than the brass. It worked out OK.

And here is the seamless titanium square dish / locket.

Now it stands to reason that one could make pretty much any form is steel and then make a seamless bowl, given enough taps with your punch.

So I am quite chuffed that it worked. I can see this method could be used to make gem stone collets or odd shaped tubes in difficult to solder metals like titanium.

Other interesting and challenging Projects